The Legacy (21 page)

“Six months.”

“And the depression? How long did it last?”

“About a week.”

“Would you tell me about it?” Dr. Albright asked. “What led up to it, if you remember.”

“I remember very well indeed. It was the first visiting day, and my father came down to the prison — it was on Terminal Island down in San Pedro — and just before he came I had this feeling that I didn't want him to come, I didn't want anyone to come, and then after he left — well, it happened.”

“And how did it end? Did something else happen?”

Barbara found herself smiling at the memory. “Yes. One of the officers — that's a euphemism for prison guards, women, you know — well, one of them, a particularly nasty one, came into my room one morning and accused me of shamming, of goldbricking, and well — well, I just exploded with anger and called her every filthy name I could think of. The girls out in the corridor, prisoners, applauded, and I got two weeks of what we called shit patrol, cleaning the toilets. But no more depression. That won't work again, I'm afraid. There are only two toilets in my house here and I clean them regularly. It doesn't help. Of course, there's a qualitative difference between those and prison toilets.”

Dr. Albright said, “In case you're wondering what's wrong with me, I'm suppressing laughter. We had an instructor at the Psychoanalytic Institute to whom laughter was anathema. He had a lovely Viennese accent, but he was an idiot. Laughter is marvelous, and I'm suppressing it because I'm deficient in independence. Tell me, Barbara, when did your father die?”

“In December of nineteen fifty-eight.”

“Dan Lavette. It's hard to think of a man like Dan Lavette dying. He was a part of it, like the bridge or Nob Hill.”

“Yes, he was part of it,” Barbara agreed.

“Coming back to the prison incident,” Dr. Albright said. “After your outburst, your punishment was the toilet detail. How did you react to it?”

“I think I loved it,” Barbara said unexpectedly.

“Oh? Go on, tell me why?”

“I'm not sure I know exactly why. Believe me, I have no proclivity toward toilets — but I guess as crazy as it sounds, it was a challenge. It gave me something to vent my anger on, and I was angry. To my way of thinking, I had done nothing wrong. I had raised money to buy medicine for sick people, and I had refused to be turned into an informer. I didn't realize at the time how angry I was; I guess I couldn't face the rage and indignation inside of me, because it was so hard to hold myself together and to overcome my fear.”

“Your fear of prison?”

“Prison, all the things I had heard and read. I remember thinking again and again that I could die there and I would never see my son again. My husband was dead and I was in prison —” The tears began again, and as she reached for the tissues, Barbara mumbled, “Must we talk about this? I'm making an utter fool of myself.”

“Just a little more. I want to hear a little more about your attitude toward the punishment. By the way, did you think of it as punishment?”

Barbara was silent for a while, and Dr. Albright waited, not pressing her to speak.

“I think not,” Barbara said finally. “I'm not exactly sure that I can explain the way I felt. All my life, I've brooded over this question of rich and poor. I suppose I was the ultimate little rich girl. I grew up in my mother's house on Russian Hill. Eight bathrooms. I never knew how many there were until one night in prison when I couldn't sleep, and I passed the time counting bathrooms. Eight. I tried to remember how many there were in my grandfather's house. He was Thomas Seldon, and when I was a little girl, he lived in a great, baronial brownstone mansion on Nob Hill. They tore it down in nineteen thirty. But all through my childhood, I was never rid of the fact that I was the only granddaughter of Thomas Seldon.”

Lost in her thoughts now, memories racing down an endless corridor of time, the huge brown mansion on Nob Hill, the half-moon driveway in front of it, the high black gates, the dim, cavernous rooms, the jungle of plants in the solarium — and then into the present where she sat facing a stout, gray-haired woman, and talking; she had not talked as much in years.

“What did you ask me?” Barbara wondered.

“Whether you reacted to the toilet detail as punishment?”

“Yes, of course. There was one bathroom that hadn't been used for years. The water had been turned off. The pipes were rusted and the bowls and sink were black with filth and stain. I cleaned it. When I finished with it, the pipes were shining, the bowls pristine white. I had a feeling of triumph that makes no sense, but it was like no other feeling I ever had.”

Dr. Albright glanced at her watch. “Would you believe it, Barbara? Our fifty-minute hour is gone.” She stood up. “If you want to continue, I'll keep ten o'clock on Friday open for you.”

“Can I think about it?”

“Of course. Why don't you call me tomorrow afternoon and let me know what you've decided.”

After Barbara had departed, Dr. Albright called Milton Kellman.

“How did it go?” Kellman asked her.

“Very well indeed. Your Barbara is quite a lady.”

“Will she continue?”

“I hope so. But I can tell you this, Milton. The depression is not endogenous. I don't believe there's any physiological basis. If we can work for a while, she'll overcome it.”

There are those in the East who insist that there is no proper springtime in California, but that is only because their antennae are tuned otherwise. To those born and bred in California, there is a subtle and wonderful harbinger of spring. When the whole land is awash and one feels the rain will never cease, there is a sudden end to the winter precipitation. The air clears and the sky dissolves into pale, pale blue. There are new sweet scents in the air, a wakening and movement in the intense green of the hillsides. There never was such green, all the more wonderful for its transience, for no sooner is it in full flush than it begins to pale and wither, beginning the transition to the dull brown of summer's end. But while spring lasts, it bestows its gifts lavishly, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Napa Valley.

All this was felt if left unsaid by the three young men and the young woman who sprawled around the fireplace on the hillside above Higate. Below them, they could see the gently contoured vine-covered fields and the stone houses of the winery, and in the distance the wide sky, flecked here and there with cottonball clouds. Since it was a warm afternoon, they had built no fire in the old fireplace, and the childhood practice of burned marsh-mallows and blackened frankfurters was in the distant past, as were such gaucheries as terming themselves “the wolf pack.” Instead, they lazily passed a joint of marijuana from mouth to mouth, less affected by the smoke than by the fact that they were here together for the spring recess, all except May Ling's brother, young Daniel, who was only eight years old — all of them the “lineage,” as Fred put it, of the “royal order” of Lavette and Levy. He stated the fact sardonically. Twenty-one years old, a junior at Princeton, long-limbed, fair-haired, he was almost the image of his father at that age, although he would have bridled at the suggestion.

“Here we are, children,” he told his companions, “the descendants of the empire-builders, the heirs, the reapers of what others have sown, celebrating our royal lineage with a joint. Thank God it's the last toke. If there's one place in America you can't buy pot, it's at Higate.”

“Don't be too sure,” his brother, Joshua, informed him. Joshua was almost sixteen, solid, heavy, built like a young bull, his hair pale orange, his skin dappled with freckles. “I don't buy, but if I wanted the stuff, the Chicanos on the place could supply.'

“You can buy in Napa,” May Ling said. A few months older than Joshua, she had the long Lavette limbs, her grandmother's ivory skin and tiny Oriental features. Her every movement was unconsciously graceful. “You can buy at my high school. I don't, but there's nothing to it if you want the stuff.”

“If you did, Sally would take your head off,” Fred told her.

“Not to mention what Aunt Sally would do to you, Freddie love,” Sam said, “if she ever knew you were feeding her darling daughter dope.”

“It's a celebration stick. No more. We stay pristine pure until we go back to school.”

“Can you buy at Princeton?” May Ling asked curiously.

“It's a marketplace. In Woodrow Wilson, the townies come in and sell on the premises.”

“He's exaggerating,” Joshua said.

“Like hell I am.”

“Just don't let it get to mom. She'd take a fit.”

“What's Woodrow Wilson?” May Ling wanted to know.

“Who, not what,” Sam informed her. “The last dreamer. He actually believed he could stop war.”

“Don't be such a smart-ass. I know about the President. Freddie's talking about a where, a place.”

“It's an eating association of sorts,” Fred explained. “At Princeton, your social standing and your belly are one. Instead of fraternity houses, they have eating clubs. I spent two years at Ivy, which is top-drawer establishment, proper place for a Lavette of San Francisco, and then neither my liver nor my immortal soul — considering that I have one — could stand any more of it. Grubby stupidity combined with alcoholic ecstasy. So for my third year, I switched to Woodrow Wilson, grubby intelligence combined with the sweet smell of pot. It's a house they put up for folk like myself who can't bear to rub elbows with the jocks or the moronic rich, and it has its advantages.”

“Such as?” Sam asked.

“Pool, for one thing. You grow up as a peasant on this wine farm, and you never hear the sweet clicking of pool balls. At this point, my game is fantastic. If they ever chuck me out of the wine business, I might just make it as a poolroom hustler. And then, to elucidate further on old Woodrow, we have a place on the premises where your date can stay the night. A glorious convenience. Not to mention the fact that some of my fellow inhabitants there have real, valid minds. They think, they probe, they are not satisfied with didactic shit.”

“Is that what you want?” Sam asked. “The wine business?”

Fred stretched, yawned lazily, and ground out the last tiny end of the marijuana cigarette. “Not really, although pop has been needling me about a master's in viticulture at Berkeley. That's Josh's end of the stick. He really digs it.”

“Not without you, big brother,” Joshua said comfortably.

“Still and all,” Sam said, “you're the only heir to the big money. Your real father owns the Lavette enterprises and practically everything else in California.”

“I don't like that term real father,” Fred said coldly.

“Biological father. Better?”

“You know something, Sammy, I've given a lot of thought to changing my name to Levy. That would mean a legal adoption by pop, and they've held off because they want me to maintain my position as a Lavette. Bullshit! I haven't seen or spoken to Thomas Lavette, my biological father, as you put it, in five years. I would love to go back to the ivy-clad halls of learning as Frederick Levy. Tell them all I'm Jewish. As a matter of fact, I'm half Jewish.”

“You are not,” May Ling told him. “Aunt Eloise isn't Jewish, and Uncle Adam is not your biological father, as you insist on putting it. I'm half Jewish — you are not.”

“First Chinese Jew,” Joshua said.

“Oh, you are bright, Joshua Levy! Like a five-watt bulb in the sunshine.”

“The fact is,” Sam said, “that we're a hopelessly mixed-up lot. You can joke about it, Freddie, and decide you're going to be a Jew. I've been living with the name of Cohen all my life. At Roxten, they made my life miserable because I was Jewish. What do I tell them — that I'm one quarter Italian, one quarter WASP, and one half Jewish? Mother says that if your mother isn't Jewish, according to Jewish law you're not Jewish. That didn't mean a damn thing to Adolf Hitler. There's a gang of Irish kids down at North Beach, and when I was just a kid they beat the hell out of me because they decided I was a Jew bastard. Josh is just one quarter Jewish, but his name is Levy, and the way I look at it, that makes him a Jew.”

“And what about me?” May Ling said. “My mother is half Jewish.”

“And your father is half Italian and half Chinese.”

“This is the craziest discussion I ever heard,” Fred said. “You know something, Sammy, the Knesset — that's the Israeli parliament — well they had to decide what was the definition of a Jew, and I'm told that anyone who says he's Jewish is Jewish. So there you are.”

“I'm going there,” Sam said.

“Where?”

“Israel.”

“You got to be kidding.”

“You mean to live?” May Ling asked incredulously. “You mean you and your mother?”

“I don't know — maybe I'll live there. Maybe not. Not mom. Just me.”

“Come on,” Fred said. “You're old enough to stop dreaming. You're going to Princeton next year, where all good Lavettes go.”

“I doubt that. I don't think mom could afford to send me to Princeton.”

“Come on, Grandma Jean is loaded. She wouldn't think of you going anywhere else. She twisted my arm until I said uncle, and you're her prime heir, not me. I'm being reserved for the Thomas Lavette millions. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take his money and shove it.”

“That'll be the day,” Joshua said.

“If you come into all that bread,” Sam said, “you can't just walk away from it. No one walks away from a hundred million or whatever it is. The trouble with you, Freddie, is that you've always been a rich kid, and it just never occurred to you how it feels not to have money.”

“Rich kid my ass. Pop isn't rich. You know he doesn't own Higate. Grandpa Jake owns it, and nobody tells him what for. And I'll tell you something else, Sammy boy, you grow up at Higate, and you're a peasant, no matter how much bread you have. And as for walking away from it, your mother did it, didn't she? I hear she came into fifteen million after old Tom Seldon died, and she gave the whole damn thing away. You ask me — that, sonny, is class. Real class. Jesus God, what a gesture!”